Posted by mxfh 2 days ago
curl -i 'https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook'
HTTP/2 302
content-length: 0
location: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/
Same for all of the country pages - they redirect back to the same story: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/morocco/
The thing was released into the public domain! No reason at all to take it down - they could have left the last published version up with a giant banner at the top saying it's no longer maintained.
That's just the specifics: Steve Bannon explicitly made it clear that one goal was to "dismantle the administrative state"
We're given two shit options which come about through a broken primary process and is reported on by monopolistic media. The news media and social media is siloed in such a way that people filter into one of two corporation-approved spheres of groupthink. These two spheres manufacture consent for each other in numerous ways, one of which is exemplified above. The good cop/bad cop setup makes it look like things are constantly getting broken only to have the illusion of being re-fixed by the other group, as measured by a pre-approved narratives that are disseminated.
The COVID pandemic is another great example. Sadly the CDC has been a disgrace under all recent administrations of both parties and has lots of blood on its hands:
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
Unfortunately the WHO has similar issues:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/1q87aki...
Almost as if capital interests are running the show. But what are we fighting about in 2026? That's right, whether we should or should not be affiliated with the WHO, and to what extent our CDC should be funded. Two broken institutions and a performative fight about them. Meanwhile millions have/will see their grave earlier than they otherwise would have, thanks to long COVID (many of whom will never even make that connection, including their doctors who were spoonfed the "vax and relax" / "back to normal" messaging in service to an archaic consumption-based economy.
Your strawman has no power here.
It's obvious when we're in a race to the bottom versus when we're making actual long-term progress that benefits a majority of voters.
So perhaps the number of people who wanted institutions dismantled remained the same. But the will of the people as a whole changed sharply, mostly because of people who decided it wasn't worth the effort to oppose it.
How do you know this? How can you say the deciding factor was dismantling institutions rather than inflation, Palestine, misogyny against a female candidate, or any number of countless other good or bad reasons to have stayed home? You can't treat a single binary choice for red or blue like it was a referendum on every single individual issue.
That aside, something that frustrates me about US politics is that I rarely see any evidence of consideration given to taxpayers who want value for their money as opposed to having their taxes cut.
I pay taxes here. I like it when those taxes spent on wildly ROI-positive initiatives like the World Factbook.
The Trump lot appear to be killing off a huge range of useful things that I like getting in exchange for the taxes I pay.
I don’t know how to square this skepticism of government against very vocal “patriotism” coming from the trump camp, but humans can contain multitudes, I guess?
In a free marketplace, when a product, service or company is no longer useful...it dies. This creates a natural incentive to constantly improve, operate more efficiently or expand into new areas where it can create value.
With government spending, this doesn't happen because there's no incentive for it to happen. Programs are created and then they grow, perpetually, forever.
My goodness, I still remember Bill Clinton proudly showing a balanced budget. I remember George Bush Jr running with one of his biggest campaign points around fixing Social Security.
How we got from that era of energy for fiscal responsibility to $39 trillion in debt is...maddening.
isnt this fair and equitable? you wouldnt pay for your neighbors lawnmower or cybertruck either?
https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/03/13/budget-pol... (you can stop reading after the first couple paragraphs, it goes into federal budget politics circa 2013)
Much more apt to say "that's not who we aspire to be'
And turned on GitHub Pages so you can browse it here: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/
https://web.archive.org/web/20260103000011/https://www.cia.g...
Clicking the link seems to show 114 photos:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260103000011/https://www.cia.g...
I didn't see a way to get high-resolution versions.
Edit: This photo from Afghanistan is called "AF_006_large.jpg", but it's only 600x450:
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/static/e926b79682b14c...
https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/attachments...
Isn’t this sufficient to keep it around, even if the facts themselves may be available on Wikipedia?
What if public policy changes? What if it is announced that there are millions of jewish people living in Iran? A CIA website claiming that there are in fact far fewer than millions would fly in the face of declared national policy. We cannot have a list of official "facts", not when new facts are being announced almost daily.
How could one ever justify invading greenland to save all those penguins when the CIA's own website states that the penguin popultion of greenland increased by 27% in the last five years?
You were by accident more factual than the administration can be deliberately.
Growing up, I was always impressed by the US’s commitment to putting excellent taxpayer-funded works like this into the public domain.
Tears in rain, sic transit, etc.
Also, it was paid for by US taxpayer dollars - the entire content should have been released somewhere for free, maybe even someone would have started up a new project to maintain it, for example, something under Wikimedia or some other nonprofit.
This wholesale elimination of valuable information and data owned by the public is so incredibly sad and damaging to our future.
Maybe we need a FOIA request to get the entire contents released to the public.
It was available for online browsing or as a downloadable file, I think a zip compressed PDF. I’m sure copies are available, but it would be nice to have an authoritative source.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-...
That’s a sound idea.
Obviously there's all sorts of covert information gathering that also goes on, but presumably the product of that is classified by default. Fortunately our executive branch is headed by intellectual types who enjoy reading and synthesizing a wealth of complex detail /s
They’re not too keen on the world either. Or books.
these details are useful for things like immigration and asylum cases, and other complaints that involve the FedGov.
The factbook was much more a tool for propaganda than anything else. While you could trust most of the numbers, you shouldn’t expect it to be fair about any socialist or communist countries, usually classified as brutal dictatorships, while it would always be exceedingly kind to countries with US sponsored dictators.
One example that comes to mind is Patrice Lumumba's assassination, allegedly authorized by the American government. There is no mention to Lumumba's government that started in 1960.
Venezuela's entry has the same issue pointed out in the DPRK's - the negative impact of sanctions imposed by the US on the economy is not mentioned, and is described as "chaotic economy due to political corruption".
It is subtle, but it is propaganda as well.
The World Fact Book doesn't have this kind of commentary. For example read the entry on North Korea. I've excerpted the most critical parts here, and I think they are a long way from your characterization:
> After the end of Soviet aid in 1991, North Korea faced serious economic setbacks that exacerbated decades of economic mismanagement and resource misallocation.
> New economic development plans in the 2010s failed to meet government-mandated goals for key industrial sectors, food production, or overall economic performance. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, North Korea instituted a nationwide lockdown that severely restricted its economy and international engagement.
> As of 2024, despite slowly renewing cross-border trade with China, North Korea remained one of the world's most isolated countries and one of Asia's poorest
https://web.archive.org/web/20260103000011/https://www.cia.g...
The catastrophic humanitarian situation IS the cause for the sanctions.
parent poster seems to want to ignore their decades of poor behavior and sheer brutality.
e.g. NK just executed people for watching squid game.
When a government uses blatant, easily disproven lies, but doubles down on the lies and continues with increasingly absurd ones, there is no space for subtlety or trustworthy sources in that government.
presumably their facts are undergoing vetting and validation.
It was. You were able to access a copy on the internet. It was neither edited nor published there. As such it simply couldn't compete with resources that are.
It clearly states on the page that the Factbook was continuously updated, with "new data uploaded this week".
I've seen so many responses from AI and AI "Summaries" that source claims from 20 year old unsourced forum posts. For that matter, people just make shit up, all the time, often for no apparent reason. It's upsetting that it took me until my 30's to realize that, but regardless I think there is value in canonical, well-funded sources, even with the internet.
It will be replaced by the new CIA factbook which will tell us it is the destiny for the white race to rule the world.
